As Nato’s biggest offensive against the Taliban gets under way in Helmand,
many of the 4,500 soldiers involved will be recalling the words of an
11-page e-mail that has circulated like wildfire among those fighting in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
“You watched Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers, and know this will be
the most difficult challenge of your life,” it starts. “But how does [all
the theory] translate into action at night, with the GPS down, the media
criticising you, the locals complaining in a language you don’t understand,
and an unseen enemy killing your people?”
Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency is
written by David Kilcullen, a 40-year-old Australian social scientist who is
trying to redefine America’s war on terror. It is based on TE Lawrence’s
Twenty-Seven Articles, a guide for British officers working with Arabs
during the first world war.
Despite being Australian — he remains a reserve lieutenant-colonel in the
Australian army — and an anthropologist, Kilcullen is the chief strategist
on counterterrorism in the US State Department. He was given the job
advising secretary of state Condoleezza Rice 18 months ago after writing an
influential paper that said Iraq and Afghanistan should not be treated as a
terrorism problem but as a globalised insurgency.
“My fundamental argument was that counterterrorism is enemy-centric — try to
destroy the terrorists then the problem goes away,” he says. “That’s clearly
not the case. Even if we kill Bin Laden, that’s not going to resolve the
conflict. The problem is a quiescent population which is preyed on by a
hostile element, so instead of going after that, you should go and protect
the population and try to win their allegiance.”
It is a view taking hold both in Washington and London. More than five years
after September 11, the US military is coming to accept that “shock and awe”
is not the answer in theatres such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Troops are now
issued with a counterinsurgency field manual, the first to be released by
the American military since Vietnam.
Counterinsurgency has been made a key part of the curriculum on the Armor
Captains’ Career Course for young US officers. In Whitehall, too, suddenly
everyone in the Foreign Office Afghan group is talking about “coin”,
shorthand for counterinsurgency.
So influential is Kilcullen’s thinking that he has also been appointed as
chief adviser on counterinsurgency to General David Petraeus, the new US
commander in Iraq. He will head a group of so-called warrior-intellectuals
whose thinking was once regarded as subversive but who are now charged with
finding the best way out of Baghdad. “A patient on intensive care,” is how
Kilcullen describes Iraq, “not lost yet but . . .”
Kilcullen’s views were developed largely in East Timor, where he commanded an
infantry company in the United Nations intervention force during the
struggle for independence, and in Indonesia where he studied Islamic
extremism for his doctorate.
When he was just 12, his father — a philosophy professor — gave him a copy of
Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he has carried ever since. “It’s
fairly battered now!” he laughs. “I do believe we can learn a great deal
from him.”
Another unconventional source is the cult 1999 film Fight Club starring Brad
Pitt about alienated young white men in America going through the process of
radicalisation, creating an ideology and forming terror cells. At the end
they carry out a widespread terrorist attack.
“If you show a film about Islamic terrorism to people who are not Muslim, all
they will see is the Islam and they will conflate the two,” he explains.
“You’ve got to show people the phenomenon in its natural condition in their
own society.”
Last month Kilcullen was in London, advising on how to take on the Taliban. He
pulls no punches over the difficulties that British troops are facing. “I
work in Iraq and various other theatres in the war on terror and have seen
the enemy up close and I can tell you this enemy we face in Afghanistan is
the toughest we face anywhere,” he said.
His 28 principles start with “diagnose the problem”. He explains: “The hardest
thing in counterinsurgency is to know what’s going on. It’s not like world
war two where you just look at a map and see Hitler’s forces are there and
the allies are here.”
The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, who launched the
Nato offensive last week, preempting an expected Taliban spring strike,
seems to have followed another of his principles — “seek early victories to
stamp your dominance”.
Perhaps most important is “know your turf”. Kilcullen is critical of senior
European officers who believe that gratitude for reconstruction will bring
people over to their side. “It’s a very naive Hollywood view of
counterinsurgency that you go in, speak the language, be nice to them and
they’ll like you,” he said.
“People will be grateful for what you’ve done but when the enemy turn up with
weapons and threaten them they will slide back to the enemy side. In
Afghanistan the population don’t exercise choice individually, it’s
collectively. You win or lose this place a village or valley at a time.”
According to Kilcullen, after more than five years in Afghanistan, the US
military now understands that. “If you watch the way American forces
operate, the first thing they do before they even deploy a soldier is engage
with the local population and talk to their leaders. A lot of American
operations now are planned by sitting down with the provincial governor, the
military and police chief and local villagers. That would have been
unimaginable back in 2001.”
He gives the example of a US commander in Kandahar who talked to villagers for
weeks before carrying out a military operation. “He had prepositioned
tailored aid packages designed to meet specific requests,” he says. “Within
a few hours of the firing finishing that package was rolling so villagers
could see an immediate benefit to cooperating.
“That pattern didn’t emerge by accident. America, unlike European countries,
has rotated its troops back to the same areas each time so you have people
operating in Afghanistan who have done two or three stints in the same
place. They know the villages, know the valleys, know the people and know
what not to do from mistakes made last time.”
That is not his only criticism of Europe. Referring to last year’s high
casualty rate in which more than 4,000 Afghans were killed, he says: “The
Europeans have been making a lot heavier use of air power than the
Americans. Most people killed by American troops — which is relatively low
compared with the Europeans — have been killed in direct rifle fire, in
one-on-one engagement where people are actively shooting at the Americans
and they’ll take them out, so there’s a pretty high chance they are killing
the right people.”
He is keen to dispel comparisons with Vietnam, pointing out that the Taliban
are all from Pashtun tribes. “The potential appeal of the Vietcong was
unlimited. All Vietnamese could see something for them in the Vietcong
agenda. But that’s just not the case with Taliban. The Pashtun population of
Afghanistan is between 23% and 40% at most.
“Even in the worst-case scenario of Talibanistan to the south and east,
Afghanistan would not fall. It has a whole area north of the Hindu Kush
which would be viable as a state; Kabul would still be viable as capital.
“That’s not to say that things are rosy but that the fundamentals of the
Afghan state are very sound compared with other insurgencies,” he says.
“Look at the approval ratings of the Afghan government — still more than
50%. Tony Blair would be very happy to get that.”
